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June 2005 offers lots of opportunities to view local and not-so-local artists' impressions of Los Angeles.
As Xeni Jardin and others blogged last week, Los Angeles artist and New Media arts professor Christian Moeller created a multi-media installation using images from the book "Looking at Los Angeles," in the Gallery at Hermes in Beverly Hills.
LAist attended the installation opening night celebration on June 2nd. When not gawking at the book's co-editors, Ben Stiller and Marla Schamburg Kennedy, and their famous friends ("Hey, look, there goes Diane Keaton and she's not wearing her trademark gloves!"), we had a chance to look at photographs of Los Angeles taken by well-known artists such as Tim Street-Porter, Diane Arbus, Julius Shulman and Andy Warhol.
Most of the photographs focus on the more alienating aspects of the Southern California landscape and architecture. Happily, a portion of the proceeds from the sale of the book "Looking at Los Angeles" benefits the historic preservation organization, Los Angeles Conservancy. The "Looking at Los Angeles" installation in the Gallery at Hermes is on view until June 17th (Hermes, 434 N. Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills, third floor).
Los Angeles Conservancy will host its own free special program organized around the "Looking at Los Angeles" book on the morning of Saturday, June 18, 2005 at the Cinerama Dome at the Arc Light.
We especially enjoyed last night's Artwalk downtown because our tour of local galleries introduced us to even more LA-themed works. Eric Richardson at BlogDowntown gives an excellent wrap up about last night's activities.
Our favorite view of LA was the massive "River Dreams" conceptual model laid out at Gallery 727 at 727 South Spring Street. (Pictured above and below). Gallery 727 has constructed a 32-foot long model of the LA river and encourages visitors to build little bits and pieces of projects along its path. Their next River Building Night is Saturday, June 18th from 8 PM to midnight.
We loitered the longest at the Ben Green Fine Art gallery, which held its own opening night party for David Meanix's new show of photo-collage sculpture called "Second Nature" and Louie Metz's latest show of paintings called "That Golden Age." We couldn't stop looking at Metz's figurative paintings of Silver Lake denizens and landmarks. Meanix's work is just as striking (and serves as the basis for the "style" invented by Claire Fisher on the HBO series -and coincidentally LAist promotional partner that has no connection or influence over this entry in anyway- "Six Feet Under" ) and we enjoyed meeting the artist.
